Top Ten

All this phrase making was a game, she thought, for if she had said half what he said, she would have blown her brains out by now.--Virginia Woolf

When I was all too briefly on Daniel's gmail group, I asked his clique what was the best movie on disability. I am not sure I saved their answers; I have my regrets about Schneider, though one look at his page says our personalities are too similar, which does not excuse the fact that I did not have to react, to him, or anyone. I could have just hit delete and hit delete and pulled on him or the clique when I thought it useful. Not sure what his complaint about Google Search means. With my colorful level of denigration I am lucky Blogger doesn't reinvent the wheel and blow me a kiss. I see nothing wrong with gay panic as a self defense, for example, since women have hit on me, four, five times. Aggression is justified when a firm no doesn't halt the behavior, and I am not a still virile Kevin Spacey gently disengaging Chris Cooper in American Beauty. The more I think about the edits made to this film due to screen testing, the less I like it, but American dysfunction and broken bodies are not quite the same.

The disability movement as it is recognized today started with the American Civil War, and in symbolic and actual terms, this fucking country always reenacts the conflict, so of course one of the most radicalized studio dares is the 1946 classic, which ends with its celebrated inclusion due to love. The double amputee lets his little woman on the inside. Aw. Love. One of Josie Byzek's favorite words of emphasis. The activists she profiles agitate against the able bodied world out of love. The thought occurs. If I log onto twitter and have a row with Hillary Clinton's account, then I'd possibly be in real trouble, and laugh silently due to my curious thought processes. An FBI dossier would get the right individuals to pay attention, and I'd launch the wheels of justice. This is probably why the poor utilize violence to resolve disputes.

Next I'd pick A Patch of Blue, so forbidden and sexually charged. It was a great influence on my desire to become (no, won't type it but I do think it) a black man's lover, which almost happened twice. The third time my father threatened my life, but that third time was a deliberate provocation on my part. I yelled at da last week "I am a throw back to Mussolini and now I am worse than you!" I guess I was trying to tell him he should have killed me. The man is now eighty and cares about absolutely nothing. Not me, his grandchildren, nothing. I am not including The Miracle Worker. All of these films carry Scott's "too schematic" charge, but this play turned movie about a favorite patron saint over does it. Beyond this there isn't much which isn't worth forgetting until we reach the present day. For me this starts in the nineties.

Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby makes the list as a backhanded compliment; the film is not about disability, which the rabid protesters either would not, or could not understand, and I defend its message without necessarily defending the actor's politics. The same entrapments closing over Swank's fighter are the ones I want out of as well.

Beyond this there are allegories, other titles, vulnerable wheelchair users, demonic wheelchair users, the *uplifting* biopic empowerment narratives that bore me in the same way a ritualized prey kill becomes a banal inconvenience, but nothing which reaches the magnitude of Orson Welles, and his ground breaking work, with the exception of Diving Bell, which Amazon finally bought for instant video. I may not view it till next month, depends.

Stories like this give me wicked, diabolical ideas, but with my luck I'd kill the worm after a fest of trots.